A Transparency Agenda for the New Administration

This is the final post in a three-part series outlining how the new leadership in Congress and the White House can restore some of the civil liberties we've lost over the past eight years. Today's post focuses on government transparency. Previously, we've written about surveillance and intellectual property.

The past eight years have seen an increase in government secrecy and a decrease in government accountability. These factors have led to record levels of distrust in our government. Here are three steps the new leadership should take to begin to restore that trust:

Leverage new technology to provide authoritative government data. It's notoriously difficult or impossible to find and manage data on legislation (both passed and proposed), on election day polling locations, on the boundaries of Congressional districts, and on government spending. All of these should be made available online for the federal and state levels, in open formats, with no intellectual property restrictions on their use, distribution or ownership.

Review the entire information-classification infrastructure and reform it to create meaningful oversight. This system has been repeatedly abused by the White House. It leaves far too much discretion in administration hands, allowing them to "capture" legislators who want to be "in the loop," forbidding them from conducting any serious investigation into the administration's illegal or questionable practices.

Restore strength to the Freedom of Information Act (FOIA). Encourage government agencies to produce documents, instead of withholding documents under overbroad pretenses. This will allow the government to assist in uncovering misconduct. A good start would be to re-introduce and pass the Faster FOIA Act.

Related Updates

San Francisco—The Electronic Frontier Foundation (EFF) launched a virtual reality (VR) experience on its website today that teaches people how to spot and understand the surveillance technologies police are increasingly using to spy on communities.“We are living in an age of surveillance, where hard-to-spot cameras capture our faces and...

EFF is filing an amicus letter in support of a petition for review, asking the California Supreme Court to overturn a harmful appellate court decision in Sander v. State Bar of California that could prevent people from requesting public records from databases that contain private information, even...

In a victory for transparency, the Federal Circuit has changed its policies to give the public immediate access to briefs. Previously, the court had marked submitted briefs as “tendered” and withheld them from the public pending review by the Clerk’s Office. That process sometimes took a number of days...

Your strong support helped us persuade California’s lawmakers to do the right thing on many important technology bills debated on the chamber floors this year. With your help, EFF won an unprecedented number of victories, supporting good bills and stopping those that would have hurt innovation and digital freedoms. Here’s...

For 20 years, McSweeney’s has been the first name (or last name, actually) in emerging short fiction. But this November, McSweeney’s will debut the first all-non-fiction issue of Timothy McSweeney’s Quarterly Concern: “The End of Trust” (Issue 54) is a collection of essays and interviews focusing on issues...

EFF has presented its full evidentiary case that the five ordinary Americans who are plaintiffs in Jewel v. NSA were among the hundreds of millions of nonsuspect Americans whose communications and communications records have been touched by the government’s mass surveillance regimes. This presentation includes a new...

“Data portability” is a feature that lets a user take their data from a service and transfer or “port” it elsewhere. This often comes up in discussions about leaving a particular social media platform and taking your data with you to a rival service. But bringing data to a competing...

In the United States, a secret federal surveillance court approves some of the government’s most enormous, opaque spying programs. It is near-impossible for the public to learn details about these programs, but, as it turns out, even the court has trouble, too. According to new opinions obtained by EFF last...

Expanded Government Authority to Destroy Drones Expected As Part of Routine FAA Bill When government agencies hide their activities from the public, private drones can be a crucial tool for transparency and public oversight. But now, some members of Congress want to give the federal government the power to intercept...

Update/correction August 22, 2018: After we published this post, the Clerk’s Office of the Federal Circuit reached out to us and explained that it is continuing to docket received briefs as ‘tendered’ and those briefs will not be available to the public through PACER until after the Clerk’s Office has...